Political commentary from the LA Times

Oops! Reporters caught on tape mocking Sarah Palin speech

It’s a banner weekend for the Republican National Committee as the ammo’s piling up for the upcoming midterm elections.

We told earlier about the gift from Vice President Joe Biden -- soon to be made into plenty of Web commercials -- who called a Wisconsin man a “smartass” for requesting lower taxes.

Now, cries of media bias against conservatives will be supercharged with an....

... audio recording going viral that captured several reporters mocking a Sarah Palin speech that they were covering.

The yet-to-be-identified (and perhaps soon-to-be-fired) reporters were located in the “media overflow” room at Cal State Stanislaus, a California college where Palin was speaking on Friday.

Immediately after her speech concluded, the insults began in rapid-fire succession, with each reporter seeming to try to outdo each other.

“Oh my God, I feel like I just got off a roller coaster, going round and round, and up and down,” one reporter said to laughter.

“You know when you’ve got to write a report as a college student and you just try to jam as many quotes in as possible from as many random things as you can? That’s what I got,” one said.

“She didn’t finish her statement,” a reporter cried.

“Did she make a statement, because I didn’t catch that either,” was the response.

“You guys gotta tell me how you’re going to make a story out of that,” another said.

The finishing touch? “Now I know that dumbness doesn’t just come in sound bites,” a smug reporter opined.

The TV station that fed the broadcast into the overflow room was so embarrassed that it quickly put out a statement distancing itself from the controversy.

“The comments overheard were made by reporters assembled from other newspaper and television outlets, and at no time was the voice of our photographer or our reporter heard on the stream,” reads the statement from FOX 40 News in Sacramento.

“It's very likely that those reporters and photographers were unaware, or simply forgot, that there was one television station with an open microphone broadcasting to the world,” it reads.

Palin has yet to post anything regarding the incident on her Facebook page.